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Your yellow face from a white enamel chair
at the foot of your bed on the ward at City Hospital
quavered its endless mantra: dooWAHD dooWAIN
that held the patience of your white inferno;
your voice accessed a few bytes of mind
still there in the wreckage of a head crash.
Since they plumped up your lungs, walked you twice a day,
you may for all I know still be crying: dooWAHD dooWAIN.
Your cry perfects you, placed at every point
of eternity and ubiquity, a universe
of superstrings in constant harmony,
saint martyred for your music: dooWAHD dooWAIN.
And I, mucking in that rubble of many years ago,
my first faith, first marriage, first career,
the birth of my first daughter,
remember you, cry Cecilia, Cecilia: dooWAHD dooWAIN.
Chelidonium majus 30C
I spun up a phone disk of ninety million names,
and found her in Denver, after forty years,
her bright face, her delicious body,
divorced, an accountant, doing homeopathy.
Told her I had migraines, sometimes bad,
and a little blue tube from France came in the mail,
full of white pills the size of BB shot,
one to be put under my tongue, every day.
I imagine that single flower, that swooping swallow,
alterative, cathartic, expectorant, diuretic,
that celandine diluted into a space
reaching beyond Orion, beyond the Pleiades,
blooming in the void, vision of Georgia O'Keefe,
with a green bud like the flower in the garland
I watched sinking in the sea past Diamond Head
sailing from Hawai'i when I was two years old,
becoming the green light of Orion's nebula
that started for earth before your face was shining,
whatever it does for my head in the gross world of carbon,
becoming the sweet taste of memory under my tongue.
Nainië: for Carolyn
We were fifteen. Hearing your song in the forest,
I'd have been Celeborn to your Galadriel.
We got unseemly drunk among those yellow trees.
yé:ni ve línte yúldar avá:nièr.
After thirty-five years we meet for breakfast
at the Radisson Rivendell, so to speak,
your hair still golden, your sun-aged face still turning
to the great mountains, to the two-treed city.
sì: mán i yúlma nín ènquántuvà?
This old hobbit, spider-engager,
nine-fingered, his feet going grey,
still goes journeying, minding your crystal.
ar hí:siè ùntú:pa Càlacíryo mí:ri óialè.
We will not meet again this side of the sea.
I sing the hotel's parking garage to echoes.
Maybe you'll find that city. Maybe I will.
Nai híruválye Válimàr. Namá:rié!
Auguries
7 AM, August 22nd 1989 / 21 Av 5749
Ardmore, Oklahoma
The crow caws on the roof's west horn
of the Maranatha Free Will Baptist church,
feeds the prophet a late breakfast.
Geese fly in a westward V.
Green-gilled mushrooms track fairy dances on the lawn.
On the creek bank of a Sunday
the Baptists were in full cry.
The gassy governor of chaos looks down red-eyed.
The hunter rises, calls his white dog, ws.
the Moon scuds in her last quarter
washed of the red eclipse, of the ninth day's shame.
Cumberland Valley Shows, Always First Class
Lebanon, Tennessee, May 1995
Small galaxy assembled in a parking lot,
with a coaster of strobed digital cosines,
with the epicycles of the double wheel,
and the High Roller with its three degrees of freedom;
these lights in the sky that might as well be stars,
vision of a god with an eye of geometry:
and the people wandering the midway, addicted
to stinking smoke, tattooed, with broken teeth,
fat kids limping with bad hips, people
of a shrinking nation blundering to being Mexico;
and in the middle, by the booth with the arcing
basketballs, the girl with the golden face
perfect as cornrows, handing out smiles
on the warm May night, looking up
at the turning bright sky, always first class.
Two Views of an Old Woman's Leg
for Arleen Rainis
She sprained it, climbing the steps the other day,
and your long legs sit down some way I never could sit
to unwrap the Ace bandage. What color is the pain?
Yellow. See YELLOW. All up and down it. See YELLOW.
And I look at that leg, that once went dancing,
swollen, pitting, the skin thin and hairless,
see the sludged arteries, the muscles shrunken,
that soon will not be walking, nor its owner.
But power flows out of your long lithe hands
into that leg seeing yellow, just now spiting
the mocking robe of Tyrian purple and logwood:
she sees her pain yellow, in your hands, she walks on it.
For Miranda, Shoshanah Bat Tamar, Bat Mitzvah
January 7th, 1995 / 6 Shevat 5755, Shabbat Bo
You were conceived at the blessing of the sun, Birkhat haHamah,
festival every twenty-eight years since Bereshith.
I remember your birth, not opening the womb,
like Shakespeare's weird king,
nor yet a son, as we knew from the chromosomes.
Mah-zot: you not yet knowing to ask me,
and I showed you your first sunlight in the hospital window:
my Lord be praised by brother sun,
who through the skies his course does run.
I remember you at three years old, like Sarah (or was it Kathy?),
your mother helping hold the match,
saying the words for your first woman's light,
that first of signs before your eyes.
Mah-zot: you were the simple voice of your four questions,
mah-zot, you kept your voice in the narrow times,
mah-zot, you're now the wise child
(was it Groucho or John?)
with the whole dinner, up to the dessert.
You speak with a woman's voice, kol-ishshah,
the voice of your mother among the wise ones,
of your grandmother, the hero, the healer,
of your great-grandmother, blessing her last Shabbat in the death camp,
of your grandmother Alice, the teacher,
of your grandmother in the twelfth generation,
martyred for a silent faith,
with a woman's voice, kol-ishshah,
says your father, the ger toshav, again still wandering.
Hotziyanu: you are brought forth, brought out, redeemed,
from childhood's narrows, from confounded Egypt of dreams.
Soul Winner, Christian Businessman, April 20th, 11 A.M.
You can have my soul
spotty squidflesh somewhere inside me,
you can have my mind
with all the neat numbers in it,
you can have my body
fast legs sludging arteries,
you can have my heart
that's so good in bed,
you can have any part.
You can have my old trousers
if they haven't emptied the Dumpster yet.
But what would you do
With my soul if you had it?
Cut out the guts and the pen,
stomp on it, tenderize it, fricassee:
you'd throw my body against the Saracen,
napalm salvation on a million gooks,
toss out my body, bury my heart.
You'd have me reborn
on the clutching rotary, the roped wheel:
I won't be born again.
January 15th, 2000